A foray into 3D animation with Silo and Blender

Overview and background

3D modeling and animation has been on my list of to-dos since I began working with computers and now I've finally taken the first steps. I thought I'd share my progress to help others get started too.

I've been an intermittent user of Bryce ever since I acquired a free version with a cover CD some years ago. As time went on and Bryce was bought and sold by various developers it seems to have finally found a home with DAZ 3D. They made few changes and fixed and brought it into version 5.5 which I upgraded to. However, although fairly intuitive, if basic, its rendering engine is painfully slow and doesn't take advantage of our dual processor Mac. Needless to say I never really accomplished much with Bryce. Bryce has recently been updated to version 6 but as yet I've not been tempted.

First Steps - Hexagon

After getting interested in the idea once more fairly recently I started looking around for the best value modeling/animation programs out there. Obviously I started on the DAZ website and found Hexagon and Carrara. I downloaded the demos for both and tried Hexagon first. Obviously I was aware that Hexagon was a modeler/texturer and Carrara was the whole works. Although the power and features of Hexagon were impressive I couldn't help but feel hindered by the interface. It seemed to have a heavy influence on the mouse and very few main functions had keyboard shortcuts, or at least they weren't detailed in the interface. Life's to short to run around finding out if things have shortcuts so I put Hexagon on the back burner and started to look for another modeler.

Modeling - Discovering Silo

My budget for this whole venture is minimal at this stage so that helped refine my selection. It wasn't long before I came across Silo at $106. I was instantly impressed by it's intuitive interface and lightweight construction. I liked software to be concise and fast rather than bloated and feature ridden. I followed one of the tutorials and had a basic model formed in no time at all. An abundance of logical keyboard shortcuts meant a very fast workflow and I found myself hardly using the visual interface at all, in fact the on-screen interface can remain hidden from view until space bar is pressed. I like this. It wasn't long before they had my paying custom.

Rendering and Animation - Starting with Carrara

Of course, this still left me without any way (apart from Bryce) to render or animate my models. On to Carrara. In sharp contrast to Silo, Carrara is a massive program. However, I imagine most of it's features really are necessary in a powerful animation/rendering tool. After working through sections of the help file I seemed to be picking Carrara up quite quickly. I did have a look around for competing software at a similar price but only seemed to be able to find much more expensive programs. Apart from Blender, which is open source and powerful but anything but intuitive. Somewhat regretfully I couldn't justify the time to learn how to use it.

So Carrara seemed to be a logical choice. I'm actually still using the demo but unless anything else comes along it looks like its power and price will win me over.

Blender, Blender, Blender!

Throughout the process of writing this article I have since found the time to have a play with Blender and walkthrough some of the tutorials and documentation. Frankly I'm amazed at the capabilities of Blender, it might not be as easy to use as Carrara but after watching things like Elephants Dream you really appreciate how powerful Blender is. I've decided to focus on this and make that my software of choice for animation and rendering.

Summary

One of the reasons why I'm interested in 3D animation at the moment is a desire to create a commercial-style short to promote Platypus. I thought it would be great to have a fully animated 3D version of the pocket-watch icon as part of a branding sequence. So this is what I set out to create with my new tools. I've actually created the pocket watch and some coins with Carrara and have since modeled an actual Platypus in Silo and taken that into Blender to animate it. I'm working on various different lighting techniques at the moment but have quite a cool little animation coming along. Keep an eye out for some examples soon! I might decide to post some renders here before they finally make it to the Platypus site.